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St. Thomas Aquinas
(1225-1274)
By universal consent, Thomas Aquinas
is the preeminent spokesman of the Catholic tradition of reason and of divine revelation. He is one of the great teachers
of the medieval Catholic Church, honored with the titles Doctor of the Church and Angelic Doctor.
At five he
was given to the Benedictine monastery at Monte Cassino in his parents’ hopes that he would choose that way of life
and eventually became abbot. In 1239 he was sent to Naples to complete his studies. It was here that he was first attracted
to Aristotle’s philosophy.
By
1243, Thomas abandoned his family’s plans for him and joined the Dominicans, much to his mother’s dismay. On her
order, Thomas was captured by his brother and kept at home for over a year. Once free, he went to Paris and then to Cologne, where he finished his studies with Albert the Great. He held two
professorships at Paris, lived at the court of Pope Urban IV, directed the Dominican schools at Rome and Viterbo, combated
adversaries of the mendicants, as well as the Averroists, and argued with some Franciscans about Aristotelianism.
His greatest contribution to the Catholic Church is his writings.
The unity, harmony and continuity of faith and reason, of revealed and natural human knowledge, pervades his writings. One
might expect Thomas, as a man of the gospel, to be an ardent defender of revealed truth. But he was broad enough, deep enough,
to see the whole natural order as coming from God the Creator, and to see reason as a divine gift to be highly cherished.
The Summa Theologiae, his last and,
unfortunately, uncompleted work, deals with the whole of Catholic theology. He stopped work on it after celebrating Mass on
December 6, 1273. When asked why he stopped writing, he replied, “I cannot go on.... All that I have written seems to
me like so much straw compared to what I have seen and what has been revealed to me.” He died March 7, 1274.
Comment:
We can look to Thomas Aquinas as a towering example of
Catholicism in the sense of broadness, universality and inclusiveness. We should be determined anew to exercise the divine
gift of reason in us, our power to know, learn and understand. At the same time we should thank God for the gift of his revelation,
especially in Jesus Christ.
Quote:
“Hence we must say that for the knowledge of any truth whatsoever man needs divine help, that
the intellect may be moved by God to its act. But he does not need a new light added to his natural light, in order to know
the truth in all things, but only in some that surpasses his natural knowledge” (Summa Theologiae, I-II,
109, 1).
Forwarded by J. Justin
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